ANNUAL REPORT 2020

The Committee for the Advancement of Role-Playing Games

Email: [email protected] Website: car-pga.org

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

To Our Members ______3 Welcome to Our Report ______3 Performance Against Our Goals ______3 2021 and Beyond ______4 Looking Ahead ______5

Tribue to Paul Cardwell ______6 Digitization of Archives ______8 Membership Update ______10

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TO OUR MEMBERS

Welcome to Our Report When I joined the Committee for the Advancement of Role-Playing Games (CAR-PGA) as Committee Chair, I worked with the board to set some basic goals. It’s been two years since we laid out those goals and after discussing with the board, we decided to produce a formal annual report on our progress.

Performance Against Our Goals • Broaden Our Mission: It took some effort, but the CAR-PGA's by-laws have been amended to include the importance of diverse players. That's reflected in our Best Practices section on Diversity & Inclusion. • Engage Our Membership: On the one hand, we've added a Gamers in Need page to include a variety of people and organizations who can use our help. On the other, we're just not engaging enough. We have some ideas on how to increase our membership, which we’ll discuss below. • Relaunch the Site: The CAR-PGA site is up and running in no small part thanks to M. Alan Thomas II. Hawke Robinson of RPG Research has taken on the daunting challenge of digitizing the extensive files of Paul Cardwell, Jr., founding member of the CAR-PGA who passed away in March 2020. I’m hopeful we can begin seeing the fruits of Hawke’s efforts this year, so we never forget history when role-playing games were under attack. • Engage the Public: Our social media is up and running on Facebook, and we regularly put out press releases via EN World. We also have a strong Google Groups and LinkedIn Groups presence. We distribute our monthly newsletter via email and on the web site, and it’s all thanks to David Millians’ tireless efforts.

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2021 and Beyond So what are our goals for this year? • Bi-Annual Town Halls: For one, we need to give our members a reason to engage. We know you're out there. But we don't hear from you nearly enough. Board member Ted Skirven recommended we meet twice a year via Zoom to report out on our progress and raise questions or issues to the board. • Quarterly Virtual Sessions: We are also proposing quarterly learning sessions where we host a topic and a guest speaker about role-playing games and invite our membership to join and discuss. We will then record these sessions and share them with the public. We welcome your thoughts on what those topics might be. • Digitize Our Archives: Hawke's work is massive in launching the RPG museum. To the extent that we can help him get more volunteers or process the CAR-PGA documents, the better. Hawke explains more in his letter below. • Increase Our Membership: The board recommended we reach out to universities who have departments focused on gaming and tabletop play. There are many such programs, and they are an untapped resource we can leverage in getting the word out about our efforts as well as invite them to join us.

“…the good news is that the CAR-PGA has an opportunity: to help, to educate, to advocate.”

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Looking Ahead 2020 was a tough year for all of us for so many reasons. That’s the bad news. But the good news is that the CAR-PGA has an opportunity: to help, to educate, to advocate. I'm hopeful that we can work together to keep Paul's vision of the CAR-PGA as a positive force in role- playing alive in 2021.

Thank you for reading, and I look forward to your attendance at our upcoming virtual meetings.

Michael Tresca Committee Chair January 20, 2021

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TRIBUE TO PAUL CARDWELL

Paul Cardwell, Jr., one of our founding members, passed away on Tuesday, March 31, in 2020. He was 86 years old and was diagnosed with cancer the month before.

Paul contributed to the tabletop role-playing game industry in countless ways through his tireless advocacy, but he was a game designer too. He published a game called M ythworld, which was inspired by Runequest, and later a game called Nuclear Winter. Randy Ray shared on RPGGeek that Paul was an RPG advocate and a game designer: “Originally, he’d planned a game called Spaceworld, which was meant to be a percentile-based competitor to Traveller. He couldn’t reconcile the laws of physics with interstellar travel, though, so he decided to pitch his own set of rules improvements to as Runequest 3. They went another direction with Runequest 3, so he published Mythworld as his alternative to that.”

Paul held several roles throughout the life of the CAR-PGA, from Chair to Board Member to most recently as Archivist. As Archivist, Paul had entire filing cabinets of important correspondence and records about RPG advocacy. Hawke Robinson has graciously offer to digitize these files (more on that below).

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In absence of an obituary, we’re hoping to add Paul’s game to the RPGGeek database as a tribute. CAR-PGa member Jonas is collecting information on the aforementioned RPGGeek thread.

Paul was CAR-PGA’s living history and will be deeply missed.

Mike Tresca

Committee Chair

I only met Paul Cardwell once in person, but he made quite an impression on me. In 1993, during a summer road trip, I stopped in Fort Worth, Texas, to attend a couple of sunny days of the Origins Game Fair and meet Paul, after corresponding with him as part of my work with GAMA and CAR-PGa. Paul was voluble and fun, full of stories of games and history, and even bought me fish and chips for lunch. He convinced me to join CAR-PGa’s work that day, and we met a friend from and played one of the first public demo decks of Magic: The Gathering. It was a blast!

Paul and I shared work on games, advocacy, and education over almost three decades that followed, and I am much richer for his advice and connections to the wider gaming world. We watched gaming change dramatically over that time and kept an eye on opportunities and communities through it all. Paul was the leader of CAR-PGa for many of those years, whether officially or through his work. He edited this newsletter until just a couple of volumes ago. He was a mentor and a friend. I miss him terribly and intend to carry on the work we began together.

Best wishes, Paul. I hope there are many games and gamers in the afterlife.

David Millians

Committee Board Member and Newsletter Editor

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DIGITIZATION OF ARCHIVES

Greetings,

Due to COVID, the team of archivists that were starting to work hands-on with the Cardwell archives we acquired, stopped coming to the location where the archives are stored until they feel safe going anywhere. We are trying (as quickly as we can) to recruit new volunteers to handle these archives (we have 60 new applicants this week for the archivists positions), but it will be a month or two before we have them onboarded, trained, and moving along again.

I also just brought online the core software we will be putting all of the research and museum (https://rpgmuseum.org) archives into, Collection Space, that will make it possible in the future to get access to all of the content electronically. It will be a learning curve getting it all working and scanned in, but it will also help everyone in the future to find research materials much more quickly with more scalable access (within the limitations of copyright laws regarding research archives and museum public access).

In 2020, with fewer than 150 volunteer and less than $10,000 in funding, we helped improve the lives of tens of thousands of people across six continents! This means all the programs that were measurably providing a direct impact on people, were provided with less than $10,000 USD!

Want to help? Join us as a volunteer at https://www.rpgresearch.com/volunteer, descriptions of open volunteer positions are detailed at https://www.rpgresearch.com/jobs. Please note that these roles are 100% unpaid volunteer positions. We distribute the workload by trying to only assign between 2-6 hours per week, per person.

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“If we can get to $30,000 in donations per year, we will finally be able to afford a warehouse for everything, move all of the documents out of the basement of my house, and RPG Research will be a fully independent entity.”

Donations are welcome: https://www.rpgresearch.com/donate. All donations go straight to keeping the organization in existence, and mostly into the costs of our community programs (and research). Thanks to these donations, RPG Research is now almost self-sustaining. If we can get to $30,000 in donations per year, we will finally be able to afford a warehouse for everything, move all of the documents out of the basement of my house, and RPG Research will be a fully independent entity.

Our number one and two goals in 2021 are: Get administrative staff volunteers in place and move files out of the packed 1,750 square foot basement of my house to a 4,000 square foot facility with 12-foot bay door. The warehouse will provide a place for a physical walkthrough experiential museum in addition to the virtual, and a wheelchair accessible environment for all RPG formats: TRPG, LRPG, ERPG, and HRPG. It will also let us take our Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) RPG and robotics development team to the next level the following year.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as our non-profit 501(c)3 group of volunteers scramble trying to keep up.

Hawke Robinson RPG Research

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MEMBERSHIP UPDATE

What makes a member? The board discussed this at our last meeting and we decided to create one database of all our members. We aren’t sharing all the information here other than a list of who is considered an official member and therefore has voting rights. If you believe you are a member but aren’t listed, please visit http://car-pga.org/join-us to submit your official application. As we reach out to guest speakers and other scholarly institutions focused on gaming, we will be using this link extensively. But for now, here’s our membership list. Feel free to reach out to your colleagues on our LinkedIn or Google groups!

• John Boardman • M. Alan Thomas • Omar G.L. Diniz • Michael Tresca • Matt Hayward • Bill Walton • Jenny Hein • • Kelly-Jeau Larson • C.J. Leblanc Please welcome our newest members! • David Millians • Michael Best • Carsten Obst • Tim Hutchings • Ronald Pehr • Jared Neilsen • Forest Ray • Matthew Pook • Hawke Robinson • John Reyst • Ted Skirvin